as consumers we make thousands of decisions every year about what to purchase we are presented with tons of choices do I pick local or California grown tomatoes paper or plastic organic or conventional LED or fluorescent it can get overwhelming and when you're trying to live a sustainable life and avoid harming the planet it only gets more difficult how do we know which product is best for the environment and more importantly how does a manufacturer change the environmental impact of a product how do we find out today we learn about what makes a product more or less environmentally friendly the tools companies use to change the impact of their products and what this means for us we learned a lot of your course about energy and we're starting to think more about energies effects on the environment and one thing sir wondering was how do we make decisions as consumers that are best for the environment for example well the other day I was in a bathroom and there are three different options to dry your hands after so there was paper towels next but there was a hair dryer that said you know reduces paper waste and then there was actually like cloths to like reusable hand towels I had no idea what to choose and it just made me realize that how do you know what's better for the environment Ruth I have the same issue because I go to the grocery store and I'm looking at plastic bags or paper bags like which is better for the environment there's a lot of discussion about you know which is which is the right choice than people should be exactly let me see the paper towels make waste and they use trees but the hand blower uses electricity and then the cloth Towser they use usable nobody they use water for you have to wash them so i guess each of them have their own impact but how early on where we go because every just are we just copying impacts from when you use the paper towel and you throw it away that's the waste you use the hand blower electricity that's the elapsed so you would have to go back all the way to the beginning and say like where did that electricity come from how was that generated and what kind of environmental impact would that have and then you would take it all the way to the point where you would have this old hand dryer that's been around for somebody here and you have to throw it away so that's called cradle abraeve because it looks at where it comes from all the materials that are involved in that product all the way to where you throw stuff away there's actually a process that they use to look at what they call lifecycle assessment so it's a process of from cradle to grave or so just what you're trying to do is try to think about what is the least it has what has the least environmental impact it's actually there's a standard for an international standard for this lifecycle assessment so that everyone doesn't the same sorta literally insane because otherwise you and Emily would would maybe assess things differently well if we want to you know research this more and find out more about LCA what would you suggest I think that there's a lot of people here at the University of Minnesota that are using LCA I would suggest a couple of my colleagues Tim there's one person doing some LCA work him as another person buttes and I'll see you at work I go visit them we should go talk to the Kim attend right Kimmy - Kevin - Kevin weird that they have the same kind of writing name so both you and LCA work come on along with Jim Jim does I see her - no yeah no not really we took David's advice and decided to dip our toes a bit deeper into the world of LCA we were able to do a little research ourselves to get more familiar with some of the terms David introduced and we were able to meet up with the two LCA experts Kim and Tim who proved to be very helpful in our quest to learn how to compare the environmental impacts of two products so I mean my name's Kimberly Molly I'm up passer here at university Minnesota I am a post doctoral researcher here at the University of Minnesota I view LC a sort of like accounting it's just accounting for environment I think of LCA lifecycle assessment as a method it's a sort of tool we have in our reasonably large toolbox of how to assess environmental impacts and assess how ways we change systems affect the environment lifecycle assessment is is with the way in which you measure the environmental impact of the environmental burden associated with things that fit on the environmental impacts are usually external to anything we do you very often do we internalize those those costs into the system so we often just let them go it's kind of like trash you know we don't know what happens with trash a lot of times you know we use something we throw it away and then it disappears it's often thought of as this sort of cradle to grave way of accounting for environmental impacts so if you're you're interested in and how this this table was manufactured you know we have to think about where this still come from how is it processed what do we do with this table when we're finished with it there's things take energy and then probably water and release you know pollutants potentially into the atmosphere waste water that sort of thing when you turn on the light switch in order to turn on the light switch there has to be a whole lot of other things that go on behind that in order for that electricity to be there when you want it we have to typically burn stuff and we have to distribute the the power that gets created by burning stuff through transmission and distribution lines so all of those kinds of processes are what LCA tries to look at tries to measure what needs to be done and what impacts happen at each of those processes and so one really neat example that has influenced me as a consumer is Levi's maker of jeans they were concerned about their sort of water use both sort of in their factories they try to make things more efficient but realized doing sort of a preliminary else by sort of going through this method sort of following the steps prescribed in this LCA methodology they found the biggest part was once the genes were in the hands of the consumer washing jeans takes a lot of water and energy and therefore indirect water which is a the biggest part of this this life cycle impact of water so learning that the designers at Levi's reformulated the dyes they used so that they could really strongly push consumers to like wash in cold water and lie and dry and like oh where these longer and return these which is a really cool example of them sort of finding out something interesting by doing this LCA which is often a consequence like oh I think it's this oh wait no it's this whole other thing oh now we have this other you know Avenue to minimize our impact with environmental issues we never know we don't know before we buy it we don't know after we bought it we don't know after we used it whether or not we're getting the environmental benefits and in my cycle assessment can sometimes be an important Avenue where the science sort of works its way into that equation so those sorts of things are more and more available to consumers to sort of say go hey this company cares about the environment I'm going to buy their product which is a nice feedback loop so more companies are taking a sort of holistic cradle-to-grave perspective in in their designs and therefore their marketing so we learned that LCA can be useful to a variety of people we were curious about who typically uses LCA in their line of work and who it can affect traditionally there's been three major users initially it was developed by industry so certain industries were really interested in how their decisions were affecting the environment particularly those who use a lot of chemicals they wanted to account for you know how these chemicals where they came from and what they were doing after they went to the environment so this LCA methodology was developed by this industry sort of coalition and later on policy makers realize that taking this sort of bigger systems for effective was really important in their decision-making if we're going to create new biofuels policies then oftentimes we need to measure what those impacts might look like if we're going to change the product systems the fuel systems that we use that we might need to know how the environmental impacts differ so we can potentially avoid major unintended consequences what I usually talk about it from the the designer side of things you know if you're if you're a company you manufacture something you're sort of in one small spot in this sort of cradle-to-grave arc of this this product the world of thumb is 80% of the burdens are sort of locked in at the design phase so if we can design a way some of those costs then oftentimes LCA gets brought into the product design as the designer how you choose to you know what materials you use or how much and how have sort of efficient your processes are your sort of design decisions have a big effect on this upstream side of things the third major users are marketers so how do we communicate about environmental impacts of things that we're already doing so we've already created this product this service is there some benefit to some consumer by knowing that there is a better environmental profile around it and of course academics we have all of these interesting sort of how do we model this more efficiently or how do we deal with these Co products and we have an interest in exploring these these systems now let's recap so we're all clear Kim and Tim have laid out a variety of users of LCA it is used in industry in order to learn the environmental impacts of a product and by policy makers who want to implement policies that regulate industries and reduce their environmental affect designers who create products and can use LCA to lessen the impacts at each life stage remember Kim's Levi's example marketers so they can use the information gained through an LCA to communicate to consumers and then consumers can use this information to make better purchasing decisions and finally academics like Kim and Tim now that we have a better understanding of why someone would want to conduct an LCA we wanted to learn more what actually goes into one we took a look at a video created by product designer Leila ajar Lu which nicely lays out the different stages of an LCA or in other words all of the different stages of creating any given product there's a lot more to think about them we imagined essentially everything that is created goes through several key lifecycle stages the extraction of raw materials manufacturing transportation and packaging use and end-of-life each of these lifecycle stages has a variety of inputs such as material energy and water and outputs such as waste emissions pollutants and byproducts lifecycle assessment breaks down all the parts and processes that go into a material or a product to then be able to assess in detail where environmental impacts occur across the entire life of a product everything that's created comes from nature at some point so in lifecycle assessment we go all the way back to the establishment of a farm and oil rig and mine site cheering something off of sheeps back or cutting a tree down is considered part of the material extraction process so in order to make wool you have to grow a sheep which means you have to clear land and grow the food all of those things are considered in part of a lifecycle assessment we thought Layla's breakdown of how an LCA assesses the life of a product was very interesting so we asked him to give us an example it's sort of a fun exercise to think through something you're like super familiar with what is all of this stuff come from so you take a hamburger so we have meat we have grains the bread product and then we have these vegetables generally cows sort of grow up somewhere and then are transported a fairly long distance and then finished so they're sort of gotten up there you know here's a nice calorie rich pile of corn and nutrients and all the stuff so we we we finished these cattle and then they're they're processed and then the meat is usually flash-frozen you have made into hamburger patties and a flash-frozen and it sent hopped into a grocery store so related to that we have sort of okay what did the cows eat okay so now we have corn so now we have to think about how corn is made and we know a fertilizer which is nitrogen based so that generally takes natural gas as you can see like we could keep sort of wandering through this pathway and think about oh we we freeze stuff so we have energy there and we transport things so we have energy there and you know emissions and we need water to clean all of the surfaces and our manufacturing processes and stuff so that's sort of maybe a third of things is this this meat side of things let me this other agricultural product and grains so we may be wheat presumably there's some high fructose corn syrup and they're fun because I bought it at McDonald's and it's a little bit sweet so we have started the corn supply chain again but also wheat so in our last sort of piece of the puzzle of the original three we've pulled this hamburger into is whatever sort of vegetable toppings kind of an interesting twist on on this sort of vegetable topping is if they were grown so outdoors rain-fed kind of local ish you know you get a nice hot ass tomato Minnesota garden in the summer probably gonna have a really low environmental impact if you're eating this in February maybe this is from a greenhouse you know a good bit of energy to keep the lights on and the heat up so that's maybe a factor or if you're importing this from the California Central Valley for example you know to embodied in your tomato is all of this terrible water politics and this drug consequences and maybe you don't feel so great about asking for like X Tomatoes on the side it's amazing to think about how much goes into the making of one hamburger we were beginning to understand just how complicated an LCA can get but now imagine we're conducting in LCA ourselves what's the first step so that first step is a goal or the framing of the question what do you try to do if you're a consumer you're saying I want to dry my hands I want to make the best choice possible but if you are a policy maker you might be having a different goal on what you're trying to reduce or what your impact you're trying to have on the environment and part of that goal you have to first decide you guys said or I'm going to dry my hands so it's one hand dry but really in the bigger picture you have to look at some measurable amount of hand drying you're looking at drying maybe ten thousand or a hundred thousand hands and what the impact of that would be a functional unit is official link for that team to find your functional unit behind us what you're younger source steps to the process the first one is trying to figure out what your goal is what you're really trying to look at the second step that is what you talked about was what goes into that product so you do an inventory in the house what goes into that product I want you to think about paper towels and what kinds of inventory analysis you have well we have to go to cradle trees trees right right cutting down trees transporting that wood right right mmm processing the wood so whatever goes into powering the machines that are then turning those trees into paper towels right manufacturing the dispenser you're transporting all of that to a store or wherever they are kept and then to the bathroom and then and then using the pier top throwing it away and having it end up wherever it ends up whole way towards high into landfill and then let's say it doesn't get recycles and now it's sitting in a dump and maybe there's some emissions yeah right so that's the cradle grid that's kind of inventory analysis every step along the way and what it's what kinds of things are involved in that process okay so we looked at we know all that's happening but that's not what we're concerned with really what we're concerned with is what that's going to do to the environment so each step along the way each step of that inventory analysis then you're going to have to look at water impacts or air impacts or whatever your goal that you set on the beginning are we just looking at energy use so we look at carbon dioxide emissions greenhouse catching this is what are we looking at you have to look for each step along that process you can have to go you with that so good luck be back in an hour oh that's it that's step three of this so defining the goal note the inventory analysis and then finding out the impacts yeah that impact assessment impact assess good okay so with our impact assessment let's say that we are just interested in I'm a policymaker and I'm concerned about climate change and so I just want to know about greenhouse gases but there's different kinds of greenhouse gases yeah and if I want to if I'm concerned about the impact some greenhouse gases have different impacts so how do I evaluate that right so there's there's a method that they use to look at the actual limit because you're right you want to know what the impact is so its impact on fish maybe or its impact on climate change you need to say like this molecule of carbon dioxide that we're meeting this process is equivalent to this much impact and this molecule of methane maybe which is another greenhouse gas will have this kind of effect on the environment actually that's a ratio of 23 to 1 so methane emissions are worse and they call that characterization where you look at those kinds of impacts I'm trying to quantify that okay so now I've characterized everything in one of the categories that were concerned with but you listed I mean there seems to be a lot of different actual categories impact categories how would you ever determine what is more important in the end you know health issues or climate change you can't can you assign a number and then the goal the end goal of LCA was to like a scientist in a number so you everyone could agree on what's more important climate or water or working in health or whatever you come up with a number and say this this particular product has a number seven this is number eight and so sudden is better than eight and so we're going with hand dryers of some sort right but that's really hard to come up with that and it also brings a lot of questions about what is more important depending on where you are in the world maybe water is important and I think thought the drought going on maybe water is a big deal or climate change just kind of out on the horizon timer Iceland but so you might wait those differently that's called waiting waiting yeah waa I waiting yeah here that I had there so there's something called normalization that's in that process normalization is saying in that impact assessment your hand your choice of hand towels or weight methods dry hands it's not as maybe as important because of the small amount that that matters so carbon emissions from mantels might be one something else that you do during they might be a thousand so that's a normalization saying really it doesn't matter yes in terms of these two that we're comparing it matters but in the big scheme of things is it really important so I think that's that normalization piece that's part of the impact assessment Tim broke this down a little bit further for us and described how he uses this process in his own work there's an actual standard for how you conduct LCA if we first have identify what the scope of the study is and why we're doing it in the first place we collect the inventory data based on the scope and the purpose of the study the objectives of the study so once we get once we know where all the the flows are coming from then we have to assess that when I manufacture fertilizer it requires a significant amount of energy inputs as as heat or as at process energy it also requires significant energy inputs as feedstocks for typically using natural gas in terms of creating at least in the u.s. it also requires it also creates significant amount of emissions whether its co2 or Analects or whatever might be and being emitted through the manufacturing process and those then those emissions have to then be characterized in terms of the impacts that they create they create they create smog locally they create local pollutants that might impact asthma in human health they emit carbon emissions that might create you know climate change or potential for climate change there might be water effluent that might pollute local waterways there might be water inputs we have to characterize each of these you need to characterize what what those emissions what those inventories create in terms of burdens so that's that's another step and then we tended then we aggregate them there's all sorts of stuff around how you normalize the data how you weight the data how you compare between between impact categories in terms of an impact assessment as opposed to just an individual category assessment impacts happen based on the time of day just like with the light switch and where we're located right if I pull if I'm if I were to turn that light switch on to 3:00 in the morning here or turn that light switch on at 3:00 in the morning in Faribault the impacts will be different right based on the time in the end the space and where I buy corn is the same thing you know if when and when and where I buy corn also has that same sort of impact where you live sort of determines a large part of your your carbon footprint sort of unfortunately some of the biggest sources of emissions as sort of just a human being living in America are a ton of your control so where your electricity comes from so in Minnesota it's roughly 60% coal and you don't have any daily direct control over the fact that you're burning one of the most emissions intensive pollution intensive sources of energy for your electricity whereas if you lived in the Pacific Northwest your sort of personal carbon footprint would drop a lot by your decision to move not by your decision to generate your electricity in a new fashion the other thing that LCA does well is that it helps you address issues of trade-offs so it might be better from a carbon emissions perspective to be able to switch to a hand dryer especially in like the Pacific Northwest right where the electricity grid is really clean lots of when there's trade-offs there too but lots of large hydro that's that's supplying the electricity so from a carbon perspective moving from paper that might be might be produced in say Idaho where it might be a very dirty grid now all of a sudden from a carbon perspective that looks great but but maybe not from water perspective or something and so oftentimes LCA can help you look between categories and begin to assess where there's trade-offs where the health impacts might be higher even though the environmental benefits are are lower a lot of what we learned in our research and in talking to Kim and Tim is that LCAs can get really complicated one of the things that's really dissatisfying about lifecycle assessment is that it always comes down to well it depends everything depends and hopefully we'll eventually get to the point where we we can better assess that it depends part of the the story when you're looking to find the best product for the environment it always depends on how you weight the different environmental impacts which do you care about more climate change or human health that can be a difficult question and you can see how weighting impacts can become a challenge another challenge with LCA is that there is a lot of information to collect and because collecting all of those data can be difficult sometimes information falls through the cracks this can lead to a lot of LCAs that aren't really complete and then sometimes there's too much data and if a company is conducting an LCA in order to reduce the inefficiencies of their overall carbon footprint that can get lost in all of that data the challenge with all of that especially from consumers perspective is it is really complicated really fast and most of us don't even if we care most of us don't have the time or the maybe even just the capacity because we have to think about lots of things I'm going to go buy a tube of toothpaste I am NOT going to spend a whole lot of time thinking about the ten pages of LCAs that could be combined no way is a consumer going to take you know five hours to do their grocery shopping instead of an hour and so we have to be careful of how we how we not only create this information about how we create signals that are appropriate for consumers to be able to respond one way to use LCAs involves using hotspots or analyzing only those parts of the lifecycle of a product that have the greatest impact in a hot spot analysis you would really only be focusing on these most impactful areas while putting less importance on the rest of the processes for the sake of making the LCA less complicated and more efficient and user-friendly in this sense it can actually be better not to collect all the data and instead just focus on the biggest impacts it's really a data intensive process a lot of the work that we're doing right now we're trying to find ways of streamlining that maybe we don't need to track down the last five percent or the latter meaning we don't have to track down the last 50 percent of processes that only make up the last two or three percent of impact alright so how can we find that the processes that matter most that's doesn't and I think an important step in making this stuff usable when we were thinking about those different hand drying methods we just wanted someone to tell us which is better and yes LCA can do that to an extent if it's done really well and really thoroughly it can tell you the total environmental impact of a process or product but even then you don't really know which is better LCA doesn't give you a number it gives you information that you can use based on your values and what you care about to help you make a decision if you're really concerned about coal then maybe you should use paper towels if you're more worried about land-use changes go with the hand dryer now we were able to find out what's hand drying method is considered the best surprise it's the air dryer but not just any air dryer those fancy superfast Dyson air dryers according to a study done at MIT actually ended up being the best now that we've finally got an answer to our original hand drying question we definitely feel more informed but we are also taking away the fact that finding the best product for the environment is not always an easy straightforward answer and remembering how David talked about normalization we realize that sometimes the small impacts like drying your hands aren't as important as the bigger ones like driving a car but by virtue of caring about this we're changing how companies act by buying a product with a better impact on the climate you're voting with your dollar and companies can hear you